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What year groups are you preparing for exams?

This year I am preparing year 13 English Literature students for their A Level English Literature exams.

What strategies are you using in lessons?

In the run up to exams, I am just pushing tonnes of independent practice, especially of essay planning. As I keep stressing to the students, it is not enough to be familiar with the content of the texts (Othello, Dracula, poetry of Christina Rossetti are just some of our texts); success in the exam is being prepared to structure a strong argument.

It’s crucial for students to be confident in how to plan, so I do lots of starters testing their knowledge of exam strategies. Today, for example, I set a task ‘bullet point the steps you take to plan your essay.’ A typical student response looked like this:

• Read/deconstruct the question
• Identify key ideas
• Identify key moments in the text, then relevant quotes
• Link to context
• Clarify the conclusion/end point of the argument

We then interrogated the student steps together:

What is missing from your approach? Which steps will be trickiest? Why? How can you make this easier?

Students then plan their essay in timed conditions, and afterwards, we discussed how well their strategy worked.

Did you finish planning in time? Which step held you up? What can you do to improve your skills with this step?

It’s all about the metacognitive discussions about how to approach the exam rather than content review (although of course I do a bit of that too!).

What strategies do you use to support homework/independent revision?

I try to check in every lesson about whether students have created a revision plan/are following it. It’s surprising how many students need support with this!

We also discuss what revision looks like: highlighting notes = bad / timed essay planning = good. Rereading notes = bad / self-testing on quotes and context = good.

So much of the last few weeks with year 13 in English Literature is about confidence-building with exam questions. I want them to be assured that whatever the question is, they feel confident they have a clear plan of attack. So my top tip is: repeat the strategies so often, students have overlearned them to the point they become second nature.   

Mrs Giubertoni